Cornelis De Jager of the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research and Silvia Duhau of the Departamento de Física, Facultad de Ingenieria, Universidad de Buenos Aires have published a new paper in the Journal of Space Weather and Space Climate titled:

I’m not sure if other bloggers have written about this. If so, here it is again. The paper forecasts solar activity for the current Solar cycle 24, which they expect will peak in May, 2013 with a maximum sunspot number Rmax of 62 ± 12.

More importantly, the authors write (emphasis added):

The subsequent analysis, based on a phase diagram, which is a diagram showing the relation between maximum sunspot numbers and minimum geomagnetic aa index values leads to the conclusion that a new Grand Episode in solar activity has started in 2008.”

A NASA-sponsored researcher at the University of Iowa has developed a way for spacecraft to hunt down hidden magnetic portals in the vicinity of Earth. These portals link the magnetic field of our planet to that of the sun.

“In the last 35 years of global warming, sun and climate have been going in opposite directions.”

First of all, Dr Jeff Masters, as a PHD in METEOROLOGY and someone running a business, is someone is naturally have respect for. You don’t accomplish what he has without having to face an overcome challenges. So I look at this differently than some of the ignorant or deceptive missives from others I have challenged before on this site, many from the climatologists that make statements that show me they don’t look at the weather.

The current prediction for Sunspot Cycle 24 gives a smoothed sunspot number maximum of about 60 in the Spring of 2013. We are currently over three years into Cycle 24. The current predicted size makes this the smallest sunspot cycle in about 100 years.

The prediction method has been slightly revised. The previous method found a fit for both the amplitude and the starting time of the cycle along with a weighted estimate of the amplitude from precursor predictions (polar fields and geomagnetic activity near cycle minimum). Recent work [see Hathaway Solar Physics; 273, 221 (2011)] indicates that the equatorward drift of the sunspot latitudes as seen in the Butterfly Diagram follows a standard path for all cycles provided the dates are taken relative to a starting time determined by fitting the full cycle. Using data for the current sunspot cycle indicates a starting date of May of 2008. Fixing this date and then finding the cycle amplitude that best fits the sunspot number data yields the current (revised) prediction.

The solar flare which erupted on March 7 was the most powerful eruption ever observed by Fermi's Large Area Telescope (LAT).

The flare, classified as X5.4, made the sun briefly the brightest object in the gamma-ray sky.

"For most of Fermi's four years in orbit, its LAT saw the sun as a faint, steady gamma-ray source thanks to the impacts of high-speed particles called cosmic rays," says Nicola Omodei, an astrophysicist at Stanford University in California. "Now we're beginning to see what the sun itself can do."

At the flare's peak, it was emitting gamma rays with two billion times the energy of visible light, or about four billion electron volts - easily setting a record for the highest-energy light ever detected during or immediately after a solar flare.

When the Greek poet Homer was writing The Odyssey around 2,800 years ago, the Earth went through an abrupt period of cooling, caused by the sun - and the same could happen again soon.

Scientists at the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences analysed lake sediment in Lake Meerfelder Maar, and found direct evidence of a sudden cooling caused by a 'solar minimum'.

Some scientists suspect that the current period of high solar activity - including increased sunspots and solar storms this year - will be followed by a 'minimum' period, which could even cause an Ice Age.

Figure 1: Comparison of solar activity (blue curve) and the Asian climate development (green curve, delta 18O of a stalagmite in a Chinese cave) for the last 9000 years (both curves normalized). One clearly sees a good agreement between the two curves, which stgrongly suggests a significant climate impact by the sun. Figure from Steinhilber et al. (2012).

The IPCC thinks the sun plays nary a role on climate and that anthropogenic factors explain almost the entire warming since 1850.

It’s been completely ignored that Gerard Bond was able to show more than 10 years ago that the last 10,000 years have been characterized by a global temperature roller coaster that runs up and down in sync with solar activity (Bond et al. 2001).